“Self-lost, and in a moment will create
Another World . . .”
– John Milton, Paradise Lost

El Greco’s The View of Toledo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
is not a
painting of the state of grace already fully realized, like Bellini’s
wondrous
St. Francis in Ecstasy. Instead, we are in the middle of a hallucination,
in
the anxious peripheries of revelation. The sky is doubt, the landscape
ambiguity,
and the source of light a riddle.
As you travel through the painting, you realize the artist is taking
you
from the proximities of the shrub beneath your feet, sweeping past the
stone architecture. You are at once pulled by the weight of weather,
human
events, history, botany, a familiar world—time-bound, color-bound,
language-
bound—up to the prospect of the skyline that is Toledo. The painting,
at this point, abruptly stops. The skyline is a horizon. There is no
beyond. There is only the above, leading the eye by way of the church
spire.
The church spire is a pointer, an indicator, to the light that creates
the
scene. The overall time of day is indeterminate—nighttime or day,
twilight
or dawn—but you do know that something supernatural is eclipsing
the scene.
This is the spot of time in which the world of weather and human
events stops. You have reached the terminus of earthly experience, even
earthly potential. There is a potential for beyond, but here, the eye
is held
by the spot of time and cast skyward. El Greco takes the scene, arrests
it,
holds it, as if the totality of his vision of Toledo is ultimately being
controlled
from beyond itself. Then, through a series of silvery gleams of
white light and the geography of billowy, downy clouds, he abstracts
you
from real time to the realm of timelessness. The approach to the realm
of
the spirit opens the only way it can: through the senses. The entire
painting
unfolds in a shadow, an overshadow, which confesses to the mystery of
religious illumination, toward the opening in the sky, an oculus in the
celestial dome. At this point, your whole being becomes absorbed in a
sensorium
of time and place. As Thoreau would say, it is a light to behold but
to dwell not in.

—

JACK BARTH is an artist who lives in New York. His work can be found
in a number
of public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the New
York
Public Library.